How to Manually Backup WordPress Posts Only (Without Plugins)

Having a backup of your site’s content is always a good idea. A backup will give you more security and peace of mind, no matter what happens to your website.

Even if you host your site on reliable hosting like SiteGround or Cloudways, which offer automatic backups, it’s better to be on the safe side and store your website files locally on your computer.

Additionally, you can upload your backup files to a cloud storage service like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud, Dropbox, etc.

In this way, you’ll have a backup of your files in 3 places:

In your hosting account
On your local drive
In the cloud

Requirements

If your website doesn’t have lots of media files like images or videos, you might want to backup your blog posts. I’m going to show you how to do that using 3 different methods.

Note: this guide is exclusively for those who want to backup their WordPress blog posts only, no media files, no theme/plugin files, etc.

You can replicate the process for pages, products, comments, custom posts, etc., but in this article I’ll focus on blog posts.

It’s also important to know that WordPress stores the data in 2 different places:

/wp-content/ folder – all media files, theme/plugin files, etc. are stored here.
WordPress database – all pages, posts, products, comments, etc. are stored here.

Now that you have a general understanding of how WordPress stores your website files, let’s see how to backup them.

Manually backup WordPress posts only

Method 1 – export option in WordPress (easy)

This is the easiest and fastest way to backup your posts. You will need to export your content using the native Export feature in WordPress.

Here is how to do it:

Login to your WordPress admin and go to Tools – Export
Select Posts and choose categories, authors, status, etc. (or select All)
Click on Download Export File

You’ve just saved an .XML file with all your blog posts on your computer. This file contains all your textual content and relevant info about your articles like date, author, category and more.

Note: this file doesn’t contain images, but just their URLs (the links where they are stored on your website).

You’ll be able to import this XML file on any other WordPress website, by accessing the Tools – Import option.

Method 2 – save web pages in your browser (easy)

This one is useful if you want to save your blog posts one by one and want to keep the visual appearance of your articles.

It might be useful when you want to migrate your website or use a different design. In this way you’ll have a reference on how your articles looked like.

Here are the steps to follow:

Open your blog post in any browser: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.
Click on File – Save Page As
Name the file and select the format: HTML only (save the markup) or Web page complete (saves the markup and all the files including images)
Click on Save

You’ve just saved the web page on your local drive.

Method 3 – save files from your hosting (advanced)

This one requires access to your hosting account and database. I’m using SitegGround hosting, so the instructions are appropriate, but you can replicate the steps for other providers.

Follow these steps:

Login to your SiteGround account
Go to Websites – Site Tools – Site – MySQL – phpMyAdmin and click on Access phpMyAdmin
You’ve accessed your WordPress database. Now go to Databases and click on your database name, for example: dbrivgsd4kkliszd
Locate the table where your posts are saved, for example: ele_posts. Click on it and then access the Export option
Select the export method (quick or custom) and the format of your exported file: SQL, CSV, XML, JSON, etc.
Click on Go and you’re done